Letter: Don’t belittle Puritan beliefs

Thursday

How tragic that some readers will examine Ted Rall’s recent article on sexual freedom and consider it truth.

How tragic that some readers will examine Ted Rall’s recent article on sexual freedom and consider it truth.

We have had 40 years of sexual freedom mythology and what has that created? Prisons filling with sexual offenders, sexual offender registries, teachers afraid to hug their students, an Internet overflowing with pornography, movies and TV full of barren sexuality, young single adults incapable of any depth in their relationships, and on and on.

Give it up, Ted. The social experiments of the 1970s are failing.

Our country is the most sexually repressed Western nation? Since when should we aspire to follow the currently declining European countries? They are broke and not having enough babies to generate a work force big enough to pay their bills.

There is a reason they are not having enough babies. Sexuality has been taken out of marriage and given the sole purpose of personal pleasure. Sure sex is fun, but it is fun with a very serious purpose of holding marriages together and creating offspring.

Oh, that we could return to some of the Puritan beliefs. Were the Puritans perfect? Of course not, but their theology laid the groundwork for our nation’s Constitution, business successes and freedoms.

Perhaps the best-known Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, ushered in the Great Awakening. His descendants include 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 80 public office holders and 100 missionaries. Perhaps Ted will tell us about the descendants of the free-sex adherents, if they have any.

The Puritan-led Great Awakening influenced lives for generations, followed by the Second Awakening in the mid-1800s. Many today are praying for a Third Great Awakening. It can come none too soon.

— Kirk W. Boyenga, Springfield

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